by Anita Shreve
Silas, he had Owen’s looks, but they came out different on him. Owen and Anna had brought him up good. You could ask anyone in town, and they would tell you the same thing.
Owen didn’t know for sure how it had happened, but he had his theories. He didn’t know as he could honestly blame the girl, but sometimes he was tempted to.
All this Owen told to a young researcher from the University of Vermont. She was a lithe woman with red hair and a respectful manner. She didn’t pry. She waited for Owen to talk. He didn’t know why he had agreed to meet with her. He felt he had something to say, and Anna, his wife, she wouldn’t listen anymore.
Sienna
I’m, like, if anyone touches me, I’m going to kill them. I have no money left. Do you have a dollar? I need . . . There’s nothing in here. Just a bunch of dimes and nickels. I changed my name. I thought it up myself. My name used to be something else, but I like Sienna better. I was traumatized. I had to be in therapy for ages. You can put your life behind you and get a new start. I haven’t thought about what happened in Vermont in, like, I don’t know. I was the victim. I think someday I’ll write a book about it. I was fourteen. Almost fifteen. You got a pencil? I have to finish this math before class. A pencil with an eraser? You want to do this in town? There’s a place I know. I had to take a year off. I hate this shirt. I hate purple. It’s just, I don’t know. I’m, like, fine now. My mom says to forget it ever happened, pretend it never happened. You’re asking why? I don’t think why is the right question to ask me. You ask them why. You like Starbucks? We could do this there. I’m seriously feeling uncomfortable here. If my roommate comes in and sees this, she’ll be all over me. I don’t feel I should have to answer questions, do you? They call this a second-chance school. There are a lot of kids here trying to forget the things they did. Like, you know, drugs and stuff. Seriously, I didn’t have any lunch. I can’t eat breakfast, and if I skip lunch or just eat a yogurt, then I can eat anything I want for dinner. I’m just so glad to be out of Vermont. When we flew into Houston that first time, I could see the ridges on the hills. They looked like they’d been folded up, like green velvet. I could see streets and playing fields and baseball diamonds and clouds floating down there. The creeks in between were milky-green. I thought to myself, I’m going to start a new life. I can be, like, Sienna. I can be whoever I want. And I could see these developments with these huge houses, and the roads were white cement and curved like S’s, and everybody had swimming pools, and I was trying to see the school from the air, and I think I might have because I saw this thing like a church and all green around it, not brown like most of the land is here. Everybody here is pretty religious. At Avery, we had to go to chapel once a week, on Tuesday mornings for assembly. Here, they go every morning to pray and sing, but it’s not complimental. I couldn’t go back to school for five weeks, and when I did, for those couple of days, people just stared, and I got all those threats. Me. Like I deserved threats? I think this must be the most expensive private school in the country. You must have to pay more for a second-chance school. For our community service, we have to turn an old ranch into a camp for under-privileged kids. The kids from Katrina are supposed to end up living there. They’ve got gangs in Houston now. My parents are still together. They really bonded over this. It’s really, like, ironical. My roommate is seriously lame. She thinks she’s so . . . Her alarm goes off an hour before it has to — dit dit dit . . . dit dit dit . . . dit dit dit — just so she can pray. Have you ever tried to sleep in a room while someone is praying out loud? Football is huge here. I just want — when I get out of here — I just want one of those houses like I flew over with the white cement and the swimming pool out back. Either that or I want to be a singer like J. Lo. I was thinking I could just go by the one name, Sienna.
Mike
The scandal, which occurred in January 2006, ruined a number of lives, Mike’s included, if a life can be said to have been ruined at any given moment in time. Personally, Mike believed erosion of character to be a longer and slower process. A chance letter from a researcher at the University of Vermont wishing to interview Mike about the scandal for a cultural-studies research project on Alcohol and Adolescent Male Behaviors in the Secondary-School Setting — a letter that Mike intended to ignore — had nevertheless awakened in him a personal need to commit his own story to paper. He wanted to do this partly to clarify the incident, which was widely and wildly misreported by the media, and partly for reasons that weren’t entirely known to him, though he did have flashes of insight not unlike the nearly unbearable brightness of the hallucinatory peaks and Vs of a migraine. Those insights suggested a need for further illumination, as if the peaks and Vs might open up to a color-saturated, wide-screen explanation of why each of the principals did what he or she did and, more important, in Mike’s case, the reasons for his own actions.
Mike had returned to Vermont after an exile of twenty-two months, not to the town in which the school was still located, but rather to a village some forty miles south, which, while charming, had little character of its own. A mecca for tourists and vacationers, the town boasted appealing inns and excellent restaurants, a thriving bookstore, and, at a discreet distance, a neighborhood of high-end outlets, all of which afforded Mike a certain degree of anonymity, a state he now valued above all else. Had he settled in a more authentic village, he would have been known as an outsider almost at once and would have been as visible as if he had walked the streets with a sign on his back. In this tourist town, however, he could be anyone — a leaf-peeper from Baltimore, a retiree from Providence, a shopper from New York looking for a bargain at Armani. Here he could stroll the famed marble sidewalks (heavily salted in winter), occasionally admiring the nineteenth-century houses that lined the green, secure in the knowledge that no one was paying him the slightest bit of attention. There was always the possibility that he would be recognized, since he had been, in the aftermath of the scandal, interviewed several times on television. He had light-brown hair that had once been blond, he was of medium height and was myopic, but, on the plus side, he had deeply recessed blue eyes that were distinctive. Depending upon how he dressed, he could be taken for a Realtor down on his luck or the headmaster of a private school, which he had been for nearly a dozen years.
He had a room at the largest of the inns in the village, a three-story classic of the Federal period. It was painted white with green shutters and could have passed for one of the buildings at Dartmouth. On its top floor were two dormers with large windows on four sides, the rooms like glass boxes perched precariously on the slate roof. Purely by circumstance, Mike had arrived on a Monday when there had been many empty rooms, and he had been given this desirable aerie. He hadn’t imagined it would take so long to get started on his story, but he had, in fact, a lot of trouble with the first sentence. A first sentence, he had discovered, dictated not only the tone of the tale but also the manner in which it would be parceled out, and he had found his first few false starts to be inhibiting. In the end, he had settled upon a factual tone that suggested a before and an after, and he had decided, in the interest of moving forward, that he would remain content with that decision.
Mike had met Silas Quinney and his family under unusual circumstances four years prior to the incident at the center of his story. Mike had been at Middlebury College for a conference for secondary-school heads. In hindsight, he should have driven home straightaway, for there was some talk of freezing rain and snow in the evening. But when the last seminar was dismissed, and he was free to roam the small town of Middlebury, with its cafés and wine bars and good restaurants, he couldn’t bring himself to get into his maroon Volvo and head south. Instead, he walked into the village — not a very long walk — and ambled up and down the narrow streets, feeling a rare sensation of freedom that in his job he was seldom able to achieve. The life of a headmaster was hardly a private one. In addition to teaching two courses in the History Department — the French Resistance During World War II and
the History of the Civil Rights Movement — and addressing assemblies and appearing at all — all — home games, no matter how humble the team (for one had to give encouragement to the underclassmen as well), and from time to time eating his lunch with the students in the cafeteria, he lived in a house that was located more or less in the middle of the campus, so that all his comings and goings were a public matter. In New England, Mike had discovered, there was a moral charge to keeping one’s curtains open in the evenings, particularly on the first floor, so that any movement Meg and he made once it got dark and the lights were turned on was visible to anyone passing by. Mike wasn’t sure why this custom had developed in the way it had — doubtless it was a holdover from seventeenth-century Calvinist rectitude — but it seemed endemic to New England in a way it was not, say, in New York. The flip side of this custom, of course, was that when walking of an evening, one got a wonderful peek into the lives of others. Indeed, one of Mike’s favorite pastimes was to stroll through a village and look into the windows of the houses and imagine who the people were and what they were doing. Invariably, he had found, a home seemed more charming viewed from the outside in. He often had moments when he wished very much that the inhabitants of this or that stately home might invite him in for a glass of wine around the fire.
That evening, the evening he met the Quinneys, Mike had had his walk and then a meal (and a glass of a local brew) and then had set out in his car to go back to Avery, an hour south of Middlebury. Contrary to the forecaster’s warnings, the roads looked fine. Occasionally there were snow squalls, but as the flakes seemed to be drying as soon as they hit the pavement, the brief flurries did not concern him. He was aware, however, of a phenomenon called black ice, familiar to all who lived in northern New England. Just its name could cause a little fillip to the heart of anyone who had ever encountered it, whether on foot or in a vehicle. The ice was called black because that was how it appeared; more accurately, it didn’t appear at all. It looked like wet pavement with no visible icy patches, and it usually wasn’t until one had put on the brakes or tried to make a tight corner that one realized how treacherous that unassuming surface was. A rumor of black ice could clear out a dinner party in minutes, and a daytime warning would send parents scurrying to the local schools to pick up their children an hour early to avoid it.
Once, when he and Meg had rented a condo on a hill for a ski weekend, he watched his wife back straight out of the driveway in the Volvo and then slide sideways all the way down to the foot of the hill. She had to abandon the car and walk up the slope where the snow was crusted just to get a foothold. Unfortunately, she had walked up the other side of the hill and could not cross the street to the condo without risking sliding all the way down again. She tried crawling, but this resulted only in a spin, which cost her about ten feet. Mike had gone back into the condo and had tried to find a piece of rope he could throw to his wife, but in the interim, she had walked to the foot of the hill, crossed the road where there was traction, and hiked up the other side. It was twenty-four hours before they’d been able to get the car towed back into the driveway.
On Mike’s return from Middlebury, traveling at forty-five miles per hour down a steep hill into the environs of Avery, he saw a car stopped in front of him and slammed on his brakes. The Volvo skidded on the black ice, crossed the road, went straight up on its nose, tumbled over, and slid for some distance on its roof with Mike still strapped inside. And in this way, he first encountered the Quinney family.
Mike didn’t remember much of that initial sighting. He was unconscious for a time, and the first thing he recalled when he came to was a kindly-faced woman lying on her stomach, reaching in and holding his arm and telling him help was on the way. By then, Mike was shaking very badly, and though he knew that he had to prop his weight off the seat belt to release it, he couldn’t seem to manage that maneuver. There was no air bag — the Volvo was an old one — but the roll bars, in combination with the seat belt, had kept him alive. When help finally arrived in the form of two young EMTs, the technicians were able to unfasten the belt and drag Mike out and lay him on a stretcher. He was taken to Western Vermont Regional Hospital, where Meg met him and where his bumps and bruises were looked at and x-rayed. Remarkably, he had escaped with little injury. More remarkable was the fact that the car, when flipped right side over, was able to be driven to an auto-body shop, where various dents and scratches were attended to.
Several days after the accident, when he had sufficiently recovered from an overall stiffness that had kept him slightly immobile, Mike borrowed Meg’s car and drove to the site of the accident. He didn’t know the inhabitants of the farm he had crashed into, though he had seen its buildings often enough as he’d driven north from town. There was a main house with a peaked roof and a front porch very close to the road, a detached garage that looked as though it had been built before the advent of the SUV, a large barn, and acres of pasture that rolled back to the tree line. Surrounding the main house and the garage was a split-rail fence, the front of which Mike had demolished upon entry. He noted, as he pulled into the driveway, a deep gouge in the dirt where his car had skidded upside down. Near the broken fence, a jagged post was tilted at a severe angle. He had beheaded, so to speak, the Quinneys’ mailbox.
Mike had come to apologize — though a skid on black ice was hardly anyone’s fault — and to offer to pay for damages. This wasn’t an entirely empty gesture, since it was possible that the inhabitants of the farm would take Mike up on his offer. The local farmers were in constant danger of going under.
His arrival detonated two sheepdogs that began barking even before they emerged at a dead run from behind the garage. Mike hesitated before opening the car door — the dogs seemed very annoyed — but then he surmised that they couldn’t be as threatening as they appeared since no one ever would have been able to visit the Quinney family home. In this he was proved right. The dogs stopped their yapping as soon as he opened the door. He tried to make friends with the mutts — Hey, boy; thatta boy — as he slip-slid his way across the driveway, where he noted a basketball hoop fastened over the opening of the garage, a skateboard in a corner of the porch, and, covered with a blue tarp to one side of the house, an all-terrain vehicle. He thus deduced a teenage boy. He didn’t meet Silas that day, but he did meet his mother, Anna, who appeared at the door. Mike recognized her at once as the woman who had held her arm out to him when he’d been hanging upside down.
“I’ve come to thank you,” Mike said after he had introduced himself and stepped inside the small house. “And to offer to pay for the damage to your fence and mailbox.”
She put a hand to the place where her oat-colored cardigan was fastened, and Mike’s eyes followed. She gestured to the kitchen table. “Won’t you sit down?” she asked. She immediately began to fill a kettle with water, at least as much to occupy herself, Mike guessed, as to provide refreshment for a guest.
“Thank you,” he said again.
Mike slipped off his gloves, set them on the table next to a blue woven place mat, and unbuttoned his coat. He guessed that he had interrupted Anna Quinney, who had on a pair of jeans and the sweater, before she had had her shower, for her light-brown hair was somewhat flat on one side and a little wild on the other. She had wide hips and long legs that gave her good lines. Beneath the oat sweater, she had what appeared to be fine breasts. She wore no makeup that he could detect. He put her at about forty.
“Coffee or tea?” she asked.
Since Mike gathered from the kettle that the coffee would be powdered, he asked for tea. She leaned against the counter and crossed her arms over her chest, a gesture that seemed both defensive and habitual. “How are you?” she asked finally.
“Amazingly well,” Mike said. “Fortunately, nothing was broken. I’m just a little banged up. But I’m fine. Fine,” he repeated as though trying to prove a point.
She smiled with some relief as if she had been worried about possible lawsuits. “We called Gary
,” she said. Mike knew that Gary was Gary Quinney, the chief of police of Avery as well as the brother of Owen Quinney. “He said he thought you would be OK. We were here in the kitchen when it happened. It was so loud, we thought at first a plane had crashed.”
Mike hadn’t been aware of any sound when he had experienced the moment of tumbling end over end, but then again he had briefly lost consciousness, so it was entirely possible that the incident, heard from outside the car, was as frightening as Anna Quinney was making out.
“Silas thought it was an earthquake,” she added.
“Really.”
“Silas is our son. He’s fourteen.”
“Eighth grade? Ninth grade?”
“Eighth,” she said, naming the local middle school. “Owen, my husband, is in the barn. He’ll be over in a minute.”
Good, Mike thought. He preferred to talk money with a man.
The kitchen was a small one. In its center was a round wooden table with four small cane chairs, one of which Mike was sitting on. There was a fireplace so close to him, he could have reached out his hand and touched it. But he gathered, from the basket of dried flowers on the hearth, that it didn’t work. On its mantel were various folk-art items: a wooden Christmas tree, a painting of a primitive landscape that he would later learn Anna Quinney had done herself, and a tin lantern. The fridge, at arm’s length the other way, was a mosaic of snapshots, news clippings, a calendar with events marked in pen, coupons, and magnets representing local businesses. The table hadn’t been entirely cleared off, and near his arm lay a white plate with a crust of toast and a blob of red jelly at its edge. Despite the clutter, or perhaps because of it, the kitchen felt inviting.